An empirical study on customers' acceptance of Web stores

This paper seeks to find out customers' preference towards Web stores. To serve the purpose, a Fishbein's multi-attribute attitude model was employed to empirically investigate the customers' attitudes toward different product categories at the Web stores. We view the consumer's intention of shopping from the Web stores as a function of beliefs about the attributes possessed by the Web stores weighted by the importance of each attribute. Web-based as well as paper-based surveys are conducted to support the analysis, and we find out products are less acceptable at the Web stores than at the traditional stores t different product categories do have different customers' indices of the Web stores. We also find that non-student shoppers appear to be more positive toward online shopping. Nevertheless, the results from our survey indicate that the gender effect and the experience effect on the acceptance index of the Web stores are not statistically significant.